Python AI Engineer (Contract) - LLM/RAG/MLOps

VDart Inc; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

VDart Inc. seeks a mid-level Python AI Developer in Seattle to design, build, and deploy AI-powered applications across data pipelines, model integration, and production APIs.

Expect hands-on work with LLMs, RAG pipelines, and AI tooling alongside a skilled data science and engineering team. The role emphasizes practical experience with Python web frameworks, REST/gRPC services, and modern MLOps practices in a collaborative, fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 3-6 years of professional Python development experience.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain Python services and APIs (FastAPI, Flask, or Django).
• Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code following established engineering standards.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and sprint planning.
• Debug and resolve production issues, including performance tuning and root cause analysis.
• Work with relational and/or NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis).
• Build and consume REST/gRPC APIs; work with message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS) and async task frameworks (Celery).
• Build and deploy ML/LLM-based services using Python, integrating models via APIs or self-hosted inference.
• Design and maintain RAG pipelines using vector DBs (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS).
• Develop agentic workflows and tool-calling integrations connecting LLMs to internal APIs and data sources.
• Use LangChain, Llamaindex, Hugging Face Transformers, or PyTorch for model development and orchestration.
• Fine-tune, evaluate, and monitor model performance; implement prompt engineering and evaluation harnesses.
• Collaborate with Data Science/ML teams on feature engineering, model serving infrastructure, and MLOps practices.
• Apply sound judgment on when/where AI capabilities add real product value vs. added complexity.
• Use AI coding assistants to accelerate development, refactoring, and debugging.
• Apply AI-assisted test generation and code review practices to improve velocity while maintaining quality.

Skills

Python

AI/ML

RAG

LLM

Django

Flask

FastAPI

RESTful

Git

Docker

CI/CD

Tools

PostgreSQL

MySQL

MongoDB

Redis

Kafka

SQS

Job description

VDart Inc. seeks a mid-level Python AI Developer in Seattle to design, build, and deploy AI-powered applications across data pipelines, model integration, and production APIs.

Expect hands-on work with LLMs, RAG pipelines, and AI tooling alongside a skilled data science and engineering team. The role emphasizes practical experience with Python web frameworks, REST/gRPC services, and modern MLOps practices in a collaborative, fast-paced environment.